If one of my two HDDs fails in RAID 1 will my OS still boot?

wh33t · 08-23-2016, 03:54 AM

Also curious how does one go about repairing the array with a new disk if one of them fails.

Thinking about building a small server using the onboard raid (I know it's not great, but surely it's better than no redundancy?).

syg00 · 08-23-2016, 04:58 AM

Read this.

syg00 · 08-23-2016, 09:25 AM

Lots of info on the Linux RAID site, but to answer the initial question, yes you can still boot if the initramfs supports mounting in degraded mode (talking mdadm here).
Seems most don't - liveCD/USB might be the answer in that case.

--fail and --remove the dodgy drive, power off, replace it and --add. Let the synch finish.
Simple.

jefro · 08-23-2016, 02:53 PM

The type of raid is very important to this question. (hardware, software, fake)

The good news is you have a new server, build it and test it with a drive failure. That is the only way to be sure.

Timothy Miller · 08-23-2016, 02:57 PM

RAID-1 = mirroring, so that's the very reason for it's existence. Ability to be unaffected in the case of a hardware failure of 1 of the 2 drives.

Performance of RAID 1 isn't that amazing however. Depending on how many drives you have, I'd definitely look into RAID-5 or 6 instead of 1 as the performance is generally much better overall.